Gulf restoration brief final

Repor t
IN BRIEF

July 2016

Efective Monitoring to Evaluate Ecological
Restoration in the Gulf of Mexico

A tremendous number of restoration projects are planned and underway in
the Gulf of Mexico to help mitigate damage done by the 2010 Macondo Well
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In order to ensure that restoration goals are met
and money is well spent, restoration monitoring and evaluation should be an
integral part of those projects. However, evaluations of past restoration efforts
have shown that monitoring is often inadequate, or even absent. This report
explains the value of monitoring restoration activities and lays out essential
elements for effective monitoring.
The Macondo Well Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the spring of 2010
resulted in the largest accidental oil spill in U.S. history. Gulf Coast commu­
nities and natural resources suffered extensive direct and indirect damage
to wetlands, coastal beaches and barrier islands, marine wildlife, seagrass
beds, oyster, and other habitats. Losses include, for example, an estimated

20% reduction in commercial ishery landings across the Gulf of Mexico and
damage to as much as 1,100 linear miles of coastal salt marsh wetlands.
The disaster spurred a restoration effort unparalleled in complexity
and magnitude. Approximately $16 billion in legal settlement money was
set aside for restoration projects that are being administered by three major
programs (see Box 1). Some settlement money also was used to create science
programs, including the sponsor of this study, the Gulf Research Program
(GRP)1 of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

THE CASE FOR RESTORATION MONITORING
Restoration monitoring serves three primary purposes: (1) to assure projects
are constructed or implemented and are initially functioning as designed
(construction monitoring); (2) to assess whether restoration goals and objec­
tives have been or are being met (performance monitoring); and (3) to inform
1
After the DWH oil spill, “as part of legal settlements with the companies involved, the
federal government asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to establish a new
program to fund and conduct activities to enhance oil system safety, human health, and
environmental resources in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S. outer continental shelf
regions that support oil and gas production.” (http://www.nationalacademies.org/gulf/)

Box 1. Gulf Restoration Programs
Three major programs administer the ~$16
billion in funds awarded in legal settle­
ments for restoration programs: the Natural
Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA)
Trustee Council, the National Fish and Wildlife
Foundation (NFWF) Gulf Environmental
Beneit Fund, and the Resources and
Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Oppor­
tunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf
Coast States (RESTORE) Council. These three
restoration programs have similar high­level
restoration goals as they relate to habitat,
living coastal and marine resources. The
NRDA Trustee Council and the RESTORE
Council also aim to restore water quality. The
NRDA Trustee Council includes explicit goals
to enhance recreational opportunities and
for monitoring and adaptive management of

its restoration efforts. The RESTORE Council
also aims to enhance community resilience
and revitalize the Gulf economy.

restoration management and to improve design of
future restoration efforts (monitoring for adaptive
management, see Figure 1). Without adequate moni­
toring, it is not possible to determine whether
restoration objectives and programmatic goals have
been achieved or whether funding is used wisely.
There are several cases where monitoring has
been shown to improve restoration effectiveness. One
is in efforts to restore oyster reefs in the Chesapeake
Bay, where oysters provide a number of beneicial
services such as supporting biodiversity and protecting
shorelines. Efforts to restore native oyster populations
led to less than adequate results leading some to
believe it might not be possible to restore the popula­
tions. However, through monitoring for adaptive
management, researchers were able to distinguish the

main factors determining oyster recovery and
amended the restoration efforts accordingly.
Although the need for restoration monitoring is
widely acknowledged, studies have shown that it is
often insuficient to draw strong conclusions about
restoration eficacy or is absent entirely. For example,
the National River Restoration Science Synthesis, one
of the few efforts to evaluate restoration efforts objec­
tively, found fewer than half of all restoration projects
had measurable objectives or collected quantitative
data to evaluate a given project’s outcomes.
To ensure that the effectiveness of restoration
projects can be evaluated, rigorous monitoring should
be viewed as an integral part of restoration, and detailed
monitoring plans should be required by restoration
funders at the time of restoration proposal submission.
Without effective monitoring, programs administering
the restoration funds will not be able demonstrate
the beneits derived from restoration investments and
justify the expenditure of funds.

ELEMENTS OF RIGOROUS RESTORATION
MONITORING AND EVALUATION
This report provides general guidance for restora­
tion monitoring, assessment, and synthesis that can
be applied to most ecological restoration supported
by the major programs. The committee considered
project­level monitoring (for localized restoration activi­
ties), monitoring to evaluate restoration outcomes for
highly mobile species (e.g., marine mammals, turtles,
and birds) over large spatial areas such as watersheds
and regional assessments, and monitoring in support of
larger­scale programmatic evaluations across multiple
states and sub­regions. Essential elements of moni­
toring plans are lists in Box 2.
Because of the breadth and diversity of coastal
habitats and species subject to restoration or restoration
plans, Part II of this report provides speciic guidance for a

Figure 1. The Adaptive Management Life Cycle.

Adaptive management is a lexible process in which new
knowledge gathered at any stage (planning, design, construc­
tion, operation) during the lifetime of a project can be used to
adjust the course of a restoration project or future projects,
thereby increasing the likelihood that restoration goals will
be achieved and undesirable outcomes avoided.

subset of restoration monitoring efforts, including oyster
reefs, tidal wetlands, and seagrass habitats, as well as a
variety of birds, sea turtles, and marine mammals. This
more speciic guidance links restoration objectives with
potential restoration measures to assess performance.

OVERARCHING RECOMMENDATIONS
The magnitude of restoration funding available as a
consequence of the DWH oil spill provides an unprece­
dented opportunity to accomplish substantial ecological
restoration throughout the Gulf of Mexico region. Given
this historic opportunity, restoration funders have the
responsibility to demonstrate in a transparent fashion

how funds are allocated, whether ecological restoration
objectives are accomplished, and what is learned from
these restoration efforts. To undertake such a moni­
toring and evaluation effort and to ensure restoration
efforts are effective and self­sustaining over the long
term, the report recommends the following:
1. Establish measurable objectives. Gulf resto­
ration programs need to develop clear and
measurable environmental and, where appropriate,
socio­economic objectives at project and program
levels to guide monitoring plans and against which
to evaluate restoration progress.
2. Require monitoring plans. All restoration
administered by the NRDA Trustee Council,

Box 2. Essential Elements of Monitoring Plans
The committee recommends that monitoring plans be considered a prerequisite for restoration funding and that
those plans contain, at minimum, the following essential elements:

•

•

•

•
•

site(s), sampling locations, timing, frequency, and
sample size;

Clearly articulated, measurable restoration objec­
tives (from the project plan);
Well­articulated management questions that
monitoring and evaluation seek to address using
conceptual system and causal models that link
ecological and socio­economic drivers and stressors
with both biophysical and ecological processes
to outcomes such as populations, habitats, eco­
system, ecosystem service, and human well­being
(as appropriate) (derived from a given project plan);

•
•
•
•

Appropriate metrics, targets and criteria for
addressing the management questions, such as
measuring ecological, and where appropriate,
social and economic restoration outcomes;
Evaluation of available baseline data appropriate to
a given project objectives and/or plans to collect
new baseline data if needed;
Appropriate sampling and analysis designs, includ­
ing consideration of reference and/or control

RESTORE Council, NFWF, and the Gulf states should
be accompanied by a strategic and rigorous moni­
toring effort, described in a monitoring plan, that
enables an assessment of progress relative to the

restoration goals and objectives articulated by the
programs and projects.
3. Make data consistent and comparable. Gulf
restoration programs should work together to
ensure that monitoring data are as consistent and
comparable as possible across the Gulf by (a) assem­
bling teams of restoration scientists, managers, and
practitioners that will identify critical metrics and
protocols that should be standardized for a given
restoration type and (b) coordinating with existing
or related environmental monitoring efforts to
establish or expand existing reference site and
monitoring networks.
4. Provide open access to data. Gulf restoration
programs should ensure that restoration moni­
toring data are publicly available by establishing
and enforcing clear policies for data archiving and
sharing. Policies need to also ensure that monitoring

•

Well­documented and, where possible, standard­
ized sampling protocols;
Rigorous data management plan (see below for
details);
Anticipated methods for data analysis and associ­
ated evaluation;
Realistic project budgets and stafing to support
the appropriate level of monitoring, study design,
data acquisition via monitoring, data analyses,
modeling, scientiic oversight, training, data
management, quality assurance, and reporting,
etc.; and
Monitoring program management plan (including
timely reporting and communication plan) to
assure that the applied monitoring program is efi­
cient, accountable and transparent at all phases of
a given effort.

data and metadata are submitted to one or more
data portals and archived with a digital repository
that has long­term support and can be trusted to
provide open data­access for several decades. This
can be accomplished by making data management
plans with deliverables a contractual requirement in
a funder’s requests for restoration proposals.
5. Synthesize what is learned across restoration activities. Because synthesis of monitoring
data is required for evaluating restoration perfor­
mance beyond individual projects and restoration
outcomes for wide­ranging species such as marine
mammals, sea turtles, and birds, Gulf restoration
programs should consider creating a speciic enter­
prise for synthesis in support of Gulf restoration.
6. Use adaptive management. Where it is deemed
appropriate, all Gulf restoration projects and
programs should apply knowledge gained through
analysis and synthesis of monitoring data by
implementing adaptive management to improve
restoration effectiveness.

COMMITTEE ON EFFECTIVE APPROACHES FOR MONITORING AND ASSESSING GULF OF
MEXICO RESTORATION ACTIVITIES
Frank W. Davis (Chair), University of California, Santa Barbara; David M. Burdick, University of New Hampshire; Loren
D. Coen, Florida Atlantic University; Peter Doering, South Florida Water Management District; Frances Gulland, Marine
Mammal Center; Kenneth L. Heck, Dauphin Island Sea Laboratory; Matthew K. Howard, Texas A&M University;
Michael S. Kearney, University of Maryland; Paul A. Montagna, Harte Research Institute; Pamela T. Plotkin, Texas
A&M University; Kenneth A. Rose, Louisiana State University; Eric P. Smith, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University; Heather M. Tallis, The Nature Conservancy; Ronald Thom, Paciic Northwest National Laboratory; Mark
S. Woodrey, Mississippi State University; Claudia Mengelt (Senior Program Oficer, Ocean Studies Board), Stephanie
Johnson (Senior Program Oficer, Water Science and Technology Board), Heather Coleman (Postdoctoral Fellow, Ocean
Studies Board), Payton Kulina (Senior Program Assistant, Ocean Studies Board), National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine

For More Information . . . Contact the Ocean Studies Board at (202) 334­2714 or visit http://www.nas.edu/osb/.
Effective Monitoring to Evaluate Ecological Restoration in the Gulf of Mexico can be purchased or downloaded free from
the National Academies Press, 500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20001; (800) 624­6242; or as free PDFS at
www.nap.edu.

Division on Earth & Life Studies

Copyright 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.